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The prices are going up for every provider. It’s across the board. Porkbun.com too.

I thought the same thing. I can only imagine police departments are being sold an elaborate tall tale of how this will save money and the accuracy is unbelievably high.

Hahaha. Yea. Been there too.

Totally agree.

I think we should all strive to do better. Unit tests, mock-ups, UX design, 2 week sprints with actual working deliverables, well documented use cases, every thing neatly stacked in Jira, dev,test,staging,prod environments, continuous integration and every thing else we are told to do.

Then reality sets in……

With all that said, 25 years as a dev, this utopian environment is almost impossible to find unless forced by regulatory compliance. Medical devices, life critical systems, etc. or if you have big piles of money.

Yep. I’ve been there.

This is very true.

Unfortunately most product managers SUCK at designing or making software.

Agile tries to fix this be supporting frequent iteration.

Unfortunately most programmers SUCK at writing good code.

TDD tries to fix this by forcing the consideration of end results (testing) at the beginning. It forces programmers and product teams to actually think and work. Make clear design decisions earlier on, but not to the point of waterfall.

It’s just a giant cesspool of failure due to human laziness that usually falls on the shoulders of QA.

Bottom line, making good software is hard. It takes time. But the market won’t support slow development. The business and sales teams remind me of Veruca Salt in Willy Wonka.

It does have a needless booby shot.

Long story short.

1. Be prepared for disaster.
2. Scan it. Sandbox it if concerned.
3. Firewall inspect/block/allow every outbound comm.
4. Get it from a trusted source.

Basically the same stuff you should be doing with all software.

Edit for firewall clarification.

The report is very light on comparative data. It does look cherry picked. I’d be much more interested in a real piece of research. I do see the point of CCDHs claims. But it’s pretty weak. Free speech has some uncomfortable aspects that the general populace doesn’t want to see. Blocking and filters can help tune the fire hose to your individual preferences. For example on X, I filter all the political out of my feed. It’s not that hard, people are just lazy.

God bless the hackers, crackers, reverse engineers, and disrupters. Pray they help keep you free of too much pain.